Saturday, April 3, 2010

Jools Watsham's Developer Diary: Busy!

Saturday, April 3, 2010: This week has been extremely busy. For Spirit we worked on a number of things, such as refining the existing player controls, adding new player control elements, and solidifying collision. The results are great, which is very encouraging. It's amazing what small differences can make to the overall feeling of a game. The player visuals are also progressing very well; it's looking really good. I've been working on "level" design, which involves creating what we call a proxy mesh. A proxy mesh is a 3D geometry model constructed in a program such as Maya or 3DS Max. I am able to make a "build" of the game to play test the proxy mesh. It is a lot of back and forth with refining the proxy mesh, play testing it, etc. We're making steady progress towards our goals. Our first official milestone is April 16, for which we need to have completed a laundry list of tasks to stay on track. All is looking good so far.On the Face project we're in the GDD phase, where we focus on developing the idea in document format with descriptions of every aspect of the game, and diagrams and tables where needed. The entire game is already pretty much figured out, it is now a matter of drilling down in more detail on everything to ensure we're not missing anything. We have until April 23 to complete this doc along with a TDD and the milestone deliverables, which is our first official milestone of the project.We have also been working on the next proposal phase for Red. This is a 12 page document that summarizes all aspects of the game, including design, programming, and art. The publisher is having a meeting on Monday to discuss, with a follow-up meeting later in the week. We will receive feedback the following week, and make updates to the doc before it is considered complete and ready for final review. This doc will determine which developer they'll choose to create the game. I am confident that our proposal is very solid, but at the end of the day you never know what the publisher is really looking for so it is a crap shoot.Next week should be a little less crazy, and we'll be able to focus more time on fewer tasks - that's always nice! :)Hope you're having a great day. TTYL.Jools

Wondering what tools are the best for level design? Maya, 3D Max, Lightwave, Blender?I wanna start some practice in one of them.Im only skilled in idsoft engine tools -GTKRadiant I made some levels/shaders/textures for Jedi Knight/Academy years ago.